To put it politely, this is sheer madness. Those of us rooted in reality, however, look on with eager anticipation — for if Obama proves us wrong, he will have defied not only the laws of politics and economics, but those of science and physics as well. It will, in short, prove to be the most amazing thing any leader, of any country, in any period of time, has ever done, ever. At first, that seems like a high bar to achieve for a 40-something law professor from Chicago. But then one recalls those nifty “progress” posters and one’s doubts are immediately put to ease.

During the campaign, and in the period after the election and before the inauguration, Obama’s supporters articulated what they believed would be Obama’s historic position and relevance. They believed the Bush-to-Obama transition would be reminiscent of the Carter-to-Reagan change, where an unsuccessful administration, widely perceived as a failure, would be followed by a saving-grace leader, who in time is vindicated by history. According to this vision, Bush was to be the Republicans’ Jimmy Carter and Obama the Democrats’ Ronald Reagan.

And wherever Obama is, in fact, breaking from Bush, he’s breaking in the entirely wrong direction. As ABC’s Jake Tapper explained, Obama has proposed $989 billion in new taxes, most of which will be on individuals. Obama will let the Bush tax cuts expire and will hike the capital gains tax on the “rich,” which will cost the rest of the country $636 billion over ten years. On businesses, Obama will repeal LIFO, the expense of drilling costs, eliminate advanced earned income tax credits, rescind the manufacturing tax deduction for oil and natural gas companies, and more, which will cost the entire country an estimated $353 billion.

This rise in spending is without parallel. As Tim Reid phrased it, “A keen poker player, Mr. Obama is gambling not only his own presidency, but the future well-being of the country. If he pulls it off, they might find room for him on Mount Rushmore. If he fails, he could bankrupt the world’s largest economy.”

Think about it: when going through tough financial times, do individuals save their money — or do they spend more than at any other time in their lives? They save, of course. Then why should governments abide by another standard? Why shouldn’t this logic be applied on a macro-level?

President Obama insists now is not the time to “do nothing.” But rather than “doing something” and focusing on the task at hand — the housing collapse and the financial sector — Obama has instead used this recession to advance his own political agenda by radically Europeanizing (read: “change”) the energy industry, the health care system, and the education system. Charles Krauthammer calls this what it is: deception. He goes on, stating:

As an explanation of our current economic difficulties, this is total fantasy. As a cure for rapidly growing joblessness, a massive destruction of wealth, a deepening worldwide recession, this is perhaps the greatest non sequitur ever foisted upon the American people.

At the very center of our economic near-depression is a credit bubble, a housing collapse, and a systemic failure of the entire banking system. One can come up with a host of causes. …

The list is long. But the list of causes of the collapse of the financial system does not include the absence of universal health care, let alone of computerized medical records. Nor the absence of an industry-killing cap-and-trade carbon levy.

Imagine a similarly absurd hypothetical scenario: Social Security collapses and Obama says we need to septuple or octuple our spending for NASA, implying space exploration will fix Social Security. Crazy, right? Well, welcome to President Obama’s economic recovery plan. It’s as if Obama thinks we’re all idiots and equally detached from real-world actuality.

Despite Obama’s best efforts, the economy will rebound in due time. That’s the nature of the beast. Yet it will be then, at the very beginning of recovery, that the pain from Obama’s frivolous spending will truly be felt. In the last five months, the geniuses in Washington have nearly tripled our money supply. Needless to say, during a recession, nothing else really grows, let alone doubles or triples.

But in one or two years’ time, things will begin to recuperate. It will only be then that all of this money, naturally, hits the market — all at the same time. The inescapable effect will be devastating hyperinflation. This will cause even greater unemployment at home, and considering the interconnectivity of the global economy, even greater economic downturns around the world. The only way to get out of double-digit inflation is to endure another recession. When this happens, the sad part will be that this all could have been avoided if only we stuck with, and continued to believe in, classically American economic principles.

And to think that all of those starry-eyed first-time voters went into the voting booth and thought their ballots would bring about a clean break from the “failed policies of the last eight years.” What a pity it is that the misplaced but sincere idealism of 2008 will invariably become the widespread cynicism and disparagement of tomorrow.

I know very little about economics. I’d like the other posters to confirm my suspicions that the rosie Huffington Post article was written by a pot smoker.

Also, why in the heck is the stock market going up? Is this the real deal or is it a temporary bubble? If the economy is in decent shape come 2010 I think we can forget a big Republican sweep of Congress.

Cynicism and disparagement are very polite terms for how I would describe how I feel about o’s plans for the nation and the future. Deep anger and outrage would also work. Assuming he fails, and I don’t see how he can’t, even with HR1388 passing and a new “green shirt” army being formed, there is going to be hell to pay in 2010 or 2011. Buckle down for a rough ride.

RE: Pops in Vienna
The article you linked to is more BS about how we can “borrow our way out of debt” which anyone over the age of 10 that has ever had an allowance knows is not reasonable or responsible. It also uses B.O.’s favorite excuse that “it’s all the Republicans (George Bush’s) fault, of course.” I certainly hope that piddly excuse wears out pretty quickly, and no doubt it will when the taxes start getting raised on those that actually work for a living, the middle class.
With all the money that our precious POTUS wasted on his Ivy League education you would have thought he might have been able to throw in at least one General Economics course.

P.S. Just your own sanity sake completely ignore anything written by the “Puffington Post” – it’s a New York Times wannabe and barely worthy of letting your dog take a sh*t on it.

The president never said that. Did he acknowledge that he inherited a debt and a crisis? Yes. Did he inherit the debt and crisis from Bush’s presidency? Yes.

#6. Sarah writes: “I certainly hope that piddly excuse wears out pretty quickly, and no doubt it will when the taxes start getting raised on those that actually work for a living, the middle class.”

Are you kidding? It will never wear out. Did the blame that Hoover received for the first depression ever “wear out”? No. Wait until we start calling the shantytowns springing up under bridges all over the country “Bushvilles.” And trust me, we will.

#6. Sarah writes: “With all the money that our precious POTUS wasted on his Ivy League education you would have thought he might have been able to throw in at least one General Economics course.”

Wait, wait, wait…I thought he was the Affirmative Action President who never worked a day in his life and became president of both the Harvard Law Review and the United States because, as Rush Limbaugh put it so aptly, “America just couldn’t stand up and say no to a black guy”. Are you now saying that he did pay for college on his own? I love the lack of inconsistency on the right wing’s hatred of your president. Also, considering that his degree partly enabled him to become POTUS, I don’t think anyone could argue that the money he spent on his degree was wasted. Maybe he should have taken the same Econ 101 class that Bush took, right? Oh. Wait. Nevermind.

#6. Sarah writes:“P.S. Just your own sanity sake completely ignore anything written by the “Puffington Post” – it’s a New York Times wannabe and barely worthy of letting your dog take a sh*t on it.”

Right. Don’t ever consider an alternative viewpoint or study the opposition party’s ideology or opinions. It may help you gain a fuller understanding of the issues, and it may help you form a cogent strategy to oppose the majority party…but don’t do it anyway. We wouldn’t want you to hurt your widdle brain.

GW-Bush: Social Conservative (Good), Fiscal Liberal (Bad) = Moderate Politician. Through this Moderate politician the innocent had a voice, but the economy embraced credit love (Debt). Expanding the government means we started programs that the tax payer is forced to maintain, usually by raising taxes. There are other ways, such as printing money through the federal reserve in order to manufacture the belief that the government actually has MONEY. This is foolish, you cannot borrow your way out of debt nor can inflate your wealth to say you are not raising taxes in order to pay down debt.

BH-Obama: Social liberal (Bad), Fiscal Liberal (Bad) = Left-wing politician. Expect major changes on family values as promised, with no real regard for the innocent. Expect no change in enlarging government to whatever the administration feels it should be. Expect larger debts, higher inflation, and a slave tag to every child born into this world saying, “Welcome to your first day on earth, you owe us $100,000. Don’t worry you can pay us back in increments for a interest rate of 24%.”

From bad to worse, from moderate to leftist, from serious condition to critical condition.

All is not lost: The answer is anecdotal, stop spending and embrace fiscal responsibility by doing things that produce real growth. Step 1: Gut the salaries and special interest spending of Congress (no-more earmarks) Step 2: Cut Taxes from the top to bottom (Eliminate Capital gains taxes both short and long term, this will produce a larger surge in real estate and investing again as well as job creations) Step 3: Drill for oil offshore (global warming is a lie) Step 4: Win the WARS (This is a tough one, but it must be done correct or we will suffer more loss, human and financial) Step 5: Move income tax rate to 8% from top to bottom or go to Fairtax system.

These steps will create a robust economy and create a path to repay all the debt we owe other countries.

Pops,
The stock market is in the high 7 range because some “entity” transacted on 142 million shares. Personally, I suspect a chunk of bailout money was used to by assests. I hope a more market savvy person looks into this as it strikes me as illegal.

Typical liberal fool, you would not know a conservative if it hit with an ACORN pamphlet. Conservatives have been protesting the RINOs for nearly a decade not to be Commucrat-lites. Bush was not a fiscal conservative and only a liberal would think that he was. In case you forgot, nearly 50 million people voted for McCain but a ton of conservatives would not support him. His only claim to fame has always been as a MSM-seeking RINO who they could get to bash the conservatives who made the Republican party.

So keep dreaming about dying movements as you prepare your explanation to your children and grandchildren why they owe more than 30K dollars just by being born as an American.

Think they will like that it was because of some boob named Barry Obama, whose only talent is appropriating other people’s hard earned money and spending it like a drunken sailor in Mexican bordello. Obama outspent McCain by 736 billion dollars to get the election, he spent 3x more than any other President in American history for his Jan. 20 party, and in his first 60 days he will have a deficit more than 4x any President ever thought about having. And that doesn’t even get into the reality that Barry has been on the public dole his entire life.

Because the Democrats ran John “freakin” Kerry who is as big a dunce as the back-bench state senator, Barry Obama. There is not a bigger doofus which could have been ran by the Democrats. Plus, America had made a promise to the Iraqis and we had nearly 200K troops in harm’s way in Afghan & Iraq. It was obvious that the Democrats were intent on losing both wars for political power. That wasn’t going to happen again.

LogicalUS writes: “Typical liberal fool, you would not know a conservative if it hit with an ACORN pamphlet. Conservatives have been protesting the RINOs for nearly a decade not to be Commucrat-lites. Bush was not a fiscal conservative and only a liberal would think that he was. In case you forgot, nearly 50 million people voted for McCain but a ton of conservatives would not support him. His only claim to fame has always been as a MSM-seeking RINO who they could get to bash the conservatives who made the Republican party. ”

What a lousy cop out. You couldn’t say a single critical thing about Bush for his entire presidency, but now that it’s apparent to everyone that he was a total screw up you can’t throw him under the bus fast enough. The truth is that when the rubber hits the road, the conservative Republican president is nothing but a myth. When’s the last time there ever was an actual fiscal conservative Republican president? Reagan spent billions on a missile defense system that never worked. Bush I raised taxes after promising that he wouldn’t and the economy tanked on his watch. What Republican president has balanced the budget?? You can moan all you want about some hypothetical ideal of the conservative leader, but as far as I can see the guy you’re describing doesn’t exist in reality. Until I see an actual example of a REAL conservative Republican leader cutting spending and balancing the budget, I can’t take you or your movement seriously.

Your meaningless diagram with its meaningless arrows looks great! Maybe the GOP can use it in the 19-page budget proposal/coloring book they’ve created. It would look superb next to the pretty pictures of windmills.

“You couldn’t say a single critical thing about Bush for his entire presidency”

That line is actually more tired than the “it’s all Bush’s fault” line.

How is it that you idiots could repeatedly cite Bush’s low approval rating, yet not have it penetrate your thick partisan skulls that WITH LESS THAN 30% APPROVAL PEOPLE OF ALL POLITICAL IDEOLOGIES MUST BE BASHING ON THE GUY?!?

Nobody thought Bush was a great president. The difference between statists and Conservatives is that we can at least admit when our guy didn’t turn out like we expected. Conservatives abandoned Bush in droves, just like we were openly speaking about what a horrible candidate McCain was. Meanwhile you have the entire statist “liberal” nation in the TOTUS’ thrall, just like the media, unwilling to rationally analyze what the man is doing or make a critical statement of him. You just keep deflecting, pretending Bush is still in power, pretending the 9 trillion in new debt is his fault, pretending that “anything is better than Bush”.

The problem with Bush was not solely the spending – it included an ill-advised revision to the tax code, giving away our nation’s prosperity for the sake of the top 2%.

Obama inherited a government with massively increased unfunded liabilities, and an economy in acute need of government intervention.

Raising taxes to cover the cost of these programs is impossible right now, but inevitable over time – to claim that Obama is following in Bush’s footsteps is a half-assed reading of the situation.

Republicans spent the Reagan-Bush years giving away the taxpayers’ money to the rich and their corporate sponsors. Now they want to complain when Obama tries to fix all the massive problems they created.

AtheistConservative moans:“Nobody thought Bush was a great president. The difference between statists and Conservatives is that we can at least admit when our guy didn’t turn out like we expected. Conservatives abandoned Bush in droves, just like we were openly speaking about what a horrible candidate McCain was.”

Firstly, there are literally tens of people on this board who would take great offense by your words that nobody thought Bush was a great president.

Secondly, you’re actually crazy to write that conservatives “admit when our guy didn’t turn out like we expected”, because that’s exactly what you did not do until the very bitter end of the Bush presidency when it became painfully obvious that continuing to tow the line that Bush was competent was making you a laughingstock. Just look at footage from CPAC 2008 and you’ll see a room full of idiots givig a standing ovation to their hero Bush. Fast forward to CPAC 2009, only a year later and it’s as if Bush never existed. So please leave your bullcrap outside. Nobody is buying it.

“Republicans spent the Reagan-Bush years giving away the taxpayers’ money”.

No, they spent the Reagan Bush years taking less of the taxpayers money. (BTW, taxpayers are people who actually pay taxes.) I know you leftists think that taking money from people that earn it and giving to others in order to buy votes and impose dependence and serfdom is a grand idea, but history shows it to be a disaster. That is reality.

Most (but not all) Democrats are truly clueless when it comes to economics. Jacking up taxes has a negative effect on private spending, on investment, and on growth. The way to expand the total amount of revenue is not to tie an anchor to the economy with high taxation. You will get a short term uptick in revenue and then much less over time. That is reality.

The best way forward is to quite lying about the leftist Democrat spendapalooza having anything to do with stimulus, learn from the mistakes of Freddie/Fannie/CRA/Fed, put these insolvent companies into bankruptcy, and stop this idiocy of massive government expansion. If the government will show some wisdom and self restraint, the markets will correct and recover. Sadly the people currently in charge are proving not to be capable of it. That is reality.

Mr. Guariglia:
“And to think that all of those starry-eyed first-time voters went into the voting booth and thought their ballots would bring about a clean break from the “failed policies of the last eight years.””

Quite…and:

We’re STILL in Iraq,
Guantanamo is STILL open,
and the PATRIOT Act is STILL the Law of the Land.

One thing about Bush to me as that he was always trying to ape Reagan. Tax cuts for the rich. Just like Reagan. Trying to be a cowboy by clearing brush on his “ranch.” Again, trying to be Reagan. Getting us into a gazillion dollar deficit. Just like Reagan. A lot of good it got us.

For people who went to public school I would say the problem is math phobia. I do not remember ever solving a useful problem in a math class and I am an engineer. I use huge amounts of math to do useful things but useful things never interested math teachers as far as I remember.

Useful thing:
Think of a billion dollars as the capital for plant and equipment required for 10,000 jobs.
If you get fewer jobs per billion you are spending wastefully if you get more, investment is paying off.

We have a 13 trillion dollar economy at a growth rate of 3% or 4% (typical post Bush tax cut growth rate) that is between 390 billion and 520 billion extra that can be spent without making the country poorer. Bush kept on the light side of the force every year except 2005 and kept pretty close even then. The Chinese benefited from our growth. Over the last eight years, they got about 60 million new middle class jobs. We kept some jobs so unemployment went down and grew the economy so that the debt was lowered as a proportion of the national income or GDP. We also fought two wars and built a country.

Obama is spending 1.3 trillion dollars extra and the economy is shrinking, not growing.
13 trillion minus 2% decline = 260 billion in the hole plus 1.3 trillion dollar deficit and the economy will be 1.5 trillion dollars poorer at the end of the year. Only if what he is doing does not work at all unemployment will rise by 15 million.

It is hard to be completely wasteful (there are couple of movies, one called “Bruster’s Millions,” about that) and I think that there will be at least a few non-government jobs. The big question is when the money that Bush loaned to the financial institutions start coming back as they start paying off the bailout money will Obama’s deficits go down?

The strawman is to the Obamaniac what the safety blanket is to the child.

Even presuming your statement to be true, are you really saying that ‘tens of people’ on a (sorry PJTV) relatively obscure message board somehow justify the tons of people still in thrall to this idiot president you guys put in?

“because that’s exactly what you did not do until the very bitter end of the Bush presidency ”

See, I realize you’re not actually making a point. You’re just a troll rolling around the boards trying to tick people off. But most of us, being more intelligent than you, know the obvious fallacy of your ridiculous statement:

You can’t possibly know whether or not Conservatives were bashing Bush because you, and your type, never listen to or read Conservative media.

If you did, you’d know all the “Republican bogeymen” that your type hold up as the bane of humanity – people like Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly, and so forth – frequently and violently disagreed with Bush’s social policies and profligate spending.

The only issue on which Conservatives mostly stuck with Bush was the Iraq war. And guess what – it was because of Bush sticking with it, and us sticking with it, that we WON. Which is, of course, what this is all about: your childish inability to accept that you were wrong about Iraq. Your childish get-even mentality put the most scandalously corrupt and incompetent person in the White House that this world has ever seen. And while he runs the country into the ground you’re floating around Conservative message boards insisting that Bush somehow justifies your stupidity.

Wow…Mr Guariglia…well said. Why aren’t the other’s such as the main stream media picking this up and reporting it? I have an idea that sooner or later the love affair will be over and there will be some kind of major backlash coming. People will catch on in short time, even the bleeding heart libs that wanted CHANGE. change can be great if it is in the right direction. This guy led us down the path to become Europe. We are now almost 100% Swedenized…Cept we have no ABBA.

His ‘intimidating’ glance at a CNN reporter.. apparently this reporter didn’t have a pre-screened question.

His use of AF1 for so many personal settings already is truly disturbing.

The dude is in forever campaign mode. Reason being is teleprompter guy had never led anything for the greater good; but only something to further his own ambition. It’s sad you don’t recognize/ acknowledge the aforementioned. Blinded by a false idol’s words (or as teleprompter guy comments, ‘..just words’). I’d expect that type of erratic behavior from someone less than 20 years old.

48 years old and this will be his first 4 successive year gig! Gee, I wonder why…

I think that Mr. Obama sincerely believes in the changes which he would introduce. What I don’t have is any sort of guarantee that these radical experiments on a grand scale can work. Green energy, carbon taxes, universal health care, income redistribution, a large ratio of debt to GDP, larger government oversight and all have never been tried or have been proven to be successful. Any engineer or business person would advise to start small, pilot test, assess, and build from success. No one in their right mind would leap into the great unknown without a rope or a contingency plan. Where is the proof that those policies would resubstantiate the American economy? Is that responsibility to spend on faith?

“The problem with Bush was not solely the spending – it included an ill-advised revision to the tax code, giving away our nation’s prosperity for the sake of the top 2%.”

I understand this is hard for you to grasp, but people in the “top 2%” don’t take handouts. They earn from their work or their holdings.

The people who take handouts are the lower 50% that has been created and permanently enslaved by wrongheaded Democratic institutions.

Cutting taxes on ‘the rich’ keeps ‘the rich’ around so the rest of us have jobs. Perhaps you haven’t been following the news in the economy – most Democrats don’t, they just tune in for the latest hopeychangey teleprompter reading and feel better while the whole thing gets worse. But news flash: our biggest performers are leaving. In droves. To overseas banks and financial institutions where they will not be restricted by clamp-down laws.

You and your type are stuck in a fool’s trap. Like your Messiah you think taxation is about ‘fairness’. It isn’t. It’s about the efficient generation of revenue.

“Obama inherited a government with massively increased unfunded liabilities, and an economy in acute need of government intervention.”

Wrong, and wrong. You are aware that the man worked in this government, right? That the part of the financial system that failed was the part engineered and protected mostly by Democrats? That every spending bill that came past Obama’s desk received his vote?

He is not some man off the street who just staggered into the situation. And more importantly, he’s not a person who wants to CUT GOVERNMENT SPENDING. You cannot say “oh this poor guy has to pay a heavy bill” while he’s increasing that bill at a geometric rate. He is a reckless spender from a party of reckless spenders.

Bush’s greatest failure was NOT being Conservative and not standing up for Conservative values. We all realize that, we’ve been complaining about it for ages.

And it’s all irrelevant. Your guy took office 50+ days ago and has already increased our deficit more than tenfold. IN A RECESSION.

Take ownership. Or stop pretending to be independent-minded and just admit you’re an Obamaniac.

“So you didn’t vote FOR Bush, you voted AGAINST Kerry. How’d that turn out?”

A lot better than the last 2 months (and I regularly criticized Bush for wasteful spending).

We are on the road to ruin. All the liberal trolling from the coffee house or wherever you losers are won’t help. Buy stuff now – your dollars will soon be worthless. Soros, your puppetmaster has already made a billion betting against the dollar over the past few months – I’m sure he’s betting even bigger that way right now.

Here’s the really hypocritical thing. You Democrats are supposed to be the ones who are pointing out how Bush created this economic mess. So why don’t I hear any criticism of Bush’s huge medicare entitlements spending (whose dollar increases were double that of Defense increases), and increased spending on education, or how his tax cuts to the poor had far more adverse effect on revenues than his tax cuts to the rich?

The fact is conservatives like some things about Bush’s policies. I certainly do, but there are some things that we criticize about him. If you ‘progressives’ were competent enough to do the same, you wouldn’t be exaggerating the problem by expanding on every Bush policy that was harmful, while rejecting every policy that was positive for national security and the economy.

#28 SteveP:
“Are you kidding? He’s barely been in office for two months. He’s got 94 months left to clean up the Republicans-made mess you decribe above.”

In the context of foreign affairs…WHAT mess?

If it’s such a “mess”, then why is the Alleged Hawaiian continuing the very policies that Dubya was crucified for?

It ain’t that hard, chappie.
Guantanamo could be closed with an executive order…and Obama has shown himself to be familiar with that mechanism.

Likewise repealing the PATRIOT Act. If you and your party can pass a few trillions of as-yet-unborn taxpayers’ dollars for Porkulus and Bail-outs and budgets, then overturning the legal underpinnings of the ChimpyMcHitlerburton 4th Reich Police State Apparatus should be quite do-able.

As for Iraq…again, your boy can just order the troops home,(I’m sure his staff knows where they can pick up a slightly used “Mission Accomplished” banner he can use to have carried before him at his one-man ticker-tape Victory Parade).

Or…could it just POSSIBLY be that ole W was right as rain all along about his foreign policy, and the fellow who claims to have been born in Hawaii was just blowing smoke up your keesters so you’d give it up for him, (electorally speaking)?

“I’m pretty confident he’ll be able to do it.”

Way to try “moving the goalposts”, laddie!

Face it…you chumps were turned out…pimped into flatbackin’ by a long-legged mack-daddy.

I realize that it’s painful to face how easily you were bamboozled, but I’m here to light a candle, not just curse your darkness, self realization is half the battle, don’t you know.

You’ve got to emancipate yourself from your freak-mind, and do so rather quickly, because since your pimp-daddy grabbed the handlebars sticking out of your heads and made you cough up the votes, he now feels he’s got a green light to go after your money.

You might feel that little twinge at admitting that you’ve been played for a colossal sucker…that you can’t AFFORD to face that possibility.
That little twinge is your Pride.

Well, F+CK Pride!

He’s counting on your Pride to keep your ass shaggin’ for his enrichment.
You made a stupid mistake and let others do your thinking for you, but now it’s your own Pride that will be what enslaves you.

First, Steve P is absolutely right. The Republicans championed Bush and his policies right down the line until their abject failure became such a liability that they had to jettison W for fear he would ruin their election chances – once again Republicans casting off their charade of principled views in favor of self-interest.

Secondly, I read and watch conservative media far more than I do other media. I’m sure Steve P has plenty of exposure to the same. We know what’s said, what’s hypocritical and arbitrary, and what is pure theater (like the “budget-that-wasn’t” we just saw presented yesterday. Aren’t you folks embarrassed by such a lame and transparent attempt? You should be. John Boehner may be the most vacuous Congressman in history. I’m surprised he didn’t break out in a sobbing endorsement of fiscal restraint. Maybe a few lessons from Glen Beck on how to castrate yourself on national TV would help.)

The theme of this article seems to be that Obama is “gambling” on increased government spending to improve our economic situation. This analogy leaves a bit to be desired. Taking a gamble usually assumes that you have a chance at winning, even by astronomical odds.

Exponential government expenditures in the face of declining revenues and no realistic way to pay for it has zero chance of working. Any economic recovery will take place despite the massive spending, which in itself is less likely the longer the spending continues.

A better analogy might be Obama sitting at the blackjack table having just busted, yelling “Hit me!”

In 1929, America had no debt. At that time, the federal government accounted for 12% of total spending and the private sector 88%. At this time, all levels of government accounts for 45% of all spending and the private sector 55%. We now have a total debt of $59.3 trillion and rising – taking into account promised future promised spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

George Bush was not in office for the 80 years since 1929. He didn’t write every word of every budget. Nor has Obama – as much as I despise the man. We have only ourselves to blame for continually re-electing presidents and congressmen who place spending taxpayer money, elections, and politics over doing what is best for this country.

They key term in all of this is DEBT. Today we honor it by calling it “having good credit.” Now we have a Puppet-In-Chief who wants expand our debt even further into the hole, Great, I thought we were already into deep. Mr. Bush as you know is not exempt from this madness nor were others before him. I know from personal experience what debt does to your life. You are not free, every dollar you earn has someone else’s name on it. My family and I were once 41,000+ in debt. We got our act together, got of debt, eliminated the credit (debt creating) cards and now we have fully funded emergency fund if a crisis were to hit us. We live on a budget and this is something that is foreign to most Americans today. Ironic that we demand fiscal responsibility from our leaders and not ourselves.

Until we purged the stench of debt from our own lives it is going nearly impossible to convince others to elect fiscal responsible leaders. The change for freedom clearly begins with the person in the mirror.

Obama is pursuing such insanely stupid policies that it really makes a person wonder if maybe he is deliberately trying to destroy the economy. How can a person get through 4 years of college and law school without knowing the most basic economic facts, he talks about mythical profit-earnings ratios and seems completely indifferent to the fact millions of people’s retirement accounts have been devastated since he has taken power and caused a free-fall in the stock market whenever he speaks on the economy. He is either a complete moron or he is deliberately making capitalism fail so he can blame it for the economy’s problems and use it as a pretext to impose full-blown socialism on the economy.

Well said. While Obama is “saving” us by spending trillions of dolars to get us all out of debt, I would like to also point a few things out I haven’t seen in previous comments….

1)The economy has its ups and downs. I find the comparisons between our current situation and depression FDR inherited to be ludicrous, considering the unemployment rate of the Great Depression reached as high as 20% (our current being around 8.4% give or take). In my opinion, I think the term “economic crisis” is being utilized as a liberal excuse to pass their agenda. Are we in a tough economic downturn? Yes. Is this a normal capitalist pattern? Yes. Would we have recovered naturally? Absolutely… If anything we should have lowered income tax rates across the board to help get us out of this rut because let’s be honest – most of us are not seeing any of this Obama “stimulus” money.

2)Let us not forget one of the main reason Barack Hussein Obama won this election- Tax relief for the American People. He ran on it, he harped on it, he won on it. “He will help big business”…”He is for the wealthy”….”I am for the Middle Class and 95% of the American People”…yada yada yada. Where is that money now Barack? It’s being spent on the hundreds of earmarks that have infested your bills, earmarks that you swore to eliminate. True, low- income families are seeing tax relief in the form of $500 ….but that just doesn’t seem to make sense.

Let’s Review:

When you increase public spending, you must simultaneously be increasing taxes. Yet, Obama is doing just the opposite : increasing spending WHILE ALSO decreasing taxes. The superhuman Barack Obama is also decreasing our national debt at the same time, so you do the math. This guy must be special…..